{Upbeat Music} Local programing on KR WG Public Media made possible in part by viewers like you.

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{Upbeat Music} (Scott) Thank you for joining us for Fronteras A Changing America.

I'm Scott brocato.

Our guest is filmmaker and former NMSU professor Dr.

Julia Smith.

In 2023, a grant from the Southwest Border Cultures Institute gave a boost to support doctors Smith's efforts to restore and digitize the films of the late Orville Wanzer who was an NMSU professor and pioneering filmmaker from the sixties, seventies and eighties.

His film, The Devil's Mistress, was the first film made in Las Cruces, the first independent film made in New Mexico by a local and was an early version of the Acid Western subgenre.

To talk about Orville Wanzer's work and her own efforts to preserve his film legacy, we welcome Dr.

Julia Smith to Fronteras, a changing America.

Well, before we get into, Orville Wanzer to talk about your own background as a filmmaker and former professor.

(Julia) Well, thanks so much for having me, Scott.

My background in film really comes from academia, and it started here at Nmsu when I was getting my master's in literature and I was offered to teach a film as literature course here, film as art during that time.

And so that really set me on a path of understanding film in a very theoretical way in terms of its esthetics and also creating meaning out of films.

So once I finished my Ph.D., I was kind of getting to the end.

I'm writing about films and I'm talking about films, but I got a job at the Purdue Libraries and I was the digital media producer and started making these little films there, and I just kind of got it intuitively.

You just kind of knew how to do it and put a film together.

I also really enjoyed the interview process.

And I was thinking, Man, I wish I could just make my dissertation as a series of short films.

I couldn't do that.

But so once I finished my Ph.D., I was kind of in the mood to make a movie.

I ended up coming back to nmsu to teach after that.

Again, film.

Film is literature or film as art.

I think the course might be called back then, and that's when I stumbled upon the Orville wanzer Film Archive that wasn't technically an archive yet.

It had been on assessed at the Rio Grand Historical Collections, and so nobody knew what they were, but there was like 144 films there.

And I was told that this film professor made a horror Western in the sixties and it just took me down this huge rabbit hole.

And in the process I've become a filmmaker and also a kind of film archivist and preservationist.

And so there's all these kinds of different ways, I suppose, that I sort of am involved in film now after kind of getting close to finishing this documentary and research.

(Scott) And what was he a professor of here when he was here?

(Julia) Yeah, well, he started in English in 1959, and right away he started teaching film courses here with one of his colleagues, John Hadsell, and they started the Campus Film Society as a part of this film as literature course, and they opened it up to the community.

And on the heels of the Devil's Mistress success in 1965, Harvey Jacobs tapped him to come work for krwg.

That was just opening and the journalism department.

He was the only guy who knew how to use film cameras.

So what I found in the archives is some of the earliest krWG programing that he did here in the studio with students.

And and then he eventually started a little kind of film school moving away from the TV programing and teaching documentary narrative and experimental filmmaking to undergraduates.

And all of those students would make a ten minute film.

And a lot of those films are also what I found at in his archive here at Nmsu in the collection.

(Scott) What was it about his style?

The more you went down the rabbit hole, as you put it, that drove you to discover more and to go through the whole process of digitizing and archiving.

(Julia) Yeah, that's a great question, because the Devil's Mistress was really the thing that took me in.

And after I watched it, I of course, thought of it as an acid Western, which I'm sure we'll discuss in a moment, and then discovering that he had a second film that was much different.

And also that he had made these kinds of montage nature photographies that he called the gila interludes, and he shot most of them in the gila as well as tons of photographic slides of macro photography of basically mostly plants and nature.

And what I what I think it really appeals to me about his films, even though they're also very different, is his approach to the creation of images that is much more about artistic expression and the drive to create something meaningful behind.

And that I think is an interest in people wanting to see the films and them being enjoyable to watch.

Beautiful or interesting or strange, or tapping into something that's more difficult to talk about, and especially mainstream filmmaking.

And I've always been appealed to outsider filmmaking, avant-garde, experimental genre bending types of films because I think they are capable of doing so much films that we actually don't tap into often.

(Scott) Well, that leads us to the devil's mistress.

What what was what is it about?

How would you describe the plot?

(Julia) The plot, in a nutshell, is there's four outlaws and they are escaping into the Organ mountains.

It starts in the foothills of the Organ mountains, and they come upon a cabin where they discover a man and his wife or daughter.

It's not really clear what their relationship is.

He calls her his woman.

And these outlaws become suspicious, like, how do you guys have food out here?

How are you not getting murdered by the Apache who are defending this territory?

I think he said it around like, you know, the late 1800's wanzer deliberately kind of put it at that time where there was all this kind of conflicts between the settlers and the native population.

And so they end up murdering the husband, raping the woman, and taking her as hostage and the rest of the film.

She then kills them off one by one in strange and mysterious ways.

And so it's a kind of a cult horror western that has this rape revenge narrative as well, which I would argue it might be the first ever rape revenge film that a woman takes the revenge herself rather than someone doing it for her.

(Scott) Which was sort of pioneering for its time, too.

(Julia) Definitely.

Yeah.

I think those gender relationships, he was really interested in kind of inverting and pushing those kinds of comfortability that we have of of how women act on screen.

So.

(Scott) So it's been deemed an acid Western.

Did he give it?

It was was he aware of that designation or how would you describe acid Western.

(Julia) Yeah.

You know, this term is something that doesn't really have a singular origin in some ways.

And it certainly didn't exist in the sixties.

It was only sort of given to these countercultural occult westerns that emerge more in the seventies, but a little bit in the sixties as well.

And so what I my shorthand for it is like an occult western or a metaphysical Western where you're tapping into the things that we can't see.

And I think that also makes it tricky, you know, in a more psychedelic or countercultural way where it's like time and space are a little off and we don't really have a sense of narrative clarity, you know, our progression or the meaning isn't kind of immediately given to us.

It only comes retroactively when we sort of work on it to see like, what did that mean?

You know, and, and if anyone has seen the devil's mistress, they know that it is a mysterious film and it's hard to pin down any specific thing that makes it make sense, you know, And it's in its entirety of like, well, what happened, you know.

(Scott) Well, you made a documentary about the making of the film called Birth of the Acid Western has since been completed.

Where are you on that?

(Julia) Well, that has been the project for, you know, since basically late 2018, slash early to late 2018, early 2019, when I finally saw the film and decided to make a documentary on it and happened to find out that wanzer was still alive and got four interviews with him, one of them with a crew of student interns.

And that just really set off the documentary.

But I hadn't I didn't have any idea what was in the archive.

There was just this whole world that I had to excavate and take in, including his novels.

His film, his stained glass, letters that he wrote throughout the end of his life.

I still haven't read everything that he's put out there, and so I'm currently finishing the documentary.

It's in post-production with a really amazing post-production company called Deadeye Post and I'm raising funds to pay them and to finish the film now.

So I'm hoping in the next 3 to 4 months I'll have at least completed a pretty good rough cut of it and have a sense of what else I need to do or or it will be done.

So I'm kind of reaching the end of this thing because I was like, I can't keep talking about making this film into 2026, ha ha ha.

(Scott) we Do have a trailer.

Let's take a look at the trailer for Birth of the Acid Western.

(Interviewee) Yes, Westerns didn't want you to like them and wanted to dig into your soul and make you uncomfortable.

That is the ethos.

Countercultural in the sixties and seventies, you brains are gonna fry out here.

You know, they {Sound of film reel playing} may have been in their original cans on the stacks down in the archives.

{music with heavy drums} You know, I opened this box, I saw this thing, that title, and it was pretty intriguing.

This is unique.

It's different.

It was made in Las Cruces by locals, but also the first feature films that were shot in Las Cruces Cowboys riding a pole in a cavern occupied by but turned out to be the devil and his mistress.

It's like a vampire Western.

And every time I've asked about orville like he never existed, which is odd, and there's no no trace of him anymore.

I guess I could ask you why you came here.

Oh, okay.

Certainly not for any academic reasons, because I had never heard of New Mexico State.

New Mexico State.

I didn't know a damn thing about Las Cruces.

I've never been in the desert.

This nice part of the world.

I'll take a shot at it.

Came to New Mexico State, 1959 August, hired on as a instructor.

Las Cruces was a small town at that time.

Everyone knew everyone getting to know Elvis.

I saw some pretty strange stuff, films that I would never go see in a movie theater.

Students got swept into this.

The problems that we have a largely problems of the mind because we live in an artificial world that we've created but no longer can satisfy the natural demands of an animal on the surface of the earth.

We now measure our whole world almost solely in terms of that dollar.

I have never seen a religion as profound.

As the worship of The American dollar.

He did not really fit in this surrounding.

i mean.

And here's a guy who was in Hollywood who loved cinema, you know, Bergman and Las Cruces and alamogordo.

I mean.

It's like two different worlds.

Yeah.

The sadness slowly left me as I walked across the street.

There's a difference between films that are from New Mexico and films that are made in New Mexico.

Not a lot of it is originating from New Mexico.

We were doing it for the art of making a movie and for us, Bergman did it with a community we needed it was four or five people, and I thought that all communities would do it, that would be the revolution.

{Woosh noise} (Scott) All right.

orville wanzer also made another film totally different in style called George Andrews.

Talk about that.

(Julia) Yeah, George Andrews was made about five years after the Devil's Mistress.

I think 1978 was around the year it was completed.

And this is a black and white film starring orville wanzer as an nmsu professor who gets into a car accident and begins to completely change his life.

Suddenly, he's disaffected with this kind of provincial life that he's created, and to give away the ending he disappears into actually kind of over at La Cueva, that's where the film ends.

And it's like he's never seen again.

And he leaves his wife and his best friend with this.

They discover a diary and what they discover in there is the words of a man that they didn't know.

And so the film is kind of told in this temporally interesting way, or it's kind of like they're discovering this, but it's also showing his life and what happened before the accident and then him sort of writing in these journals.

And it's a very.

(scott) is it more of A personal film, would you say?

(Julia) Yes, I would.

I would say that.

And I would also say it's more of ahhhh more of like a Bergman film or like a more of an art film than The Devil's Mistress, which was trying to be more like, we're going to get this distributed.

So it was more playing with the genre and the b-movie, whereas this was his personal film and he wasn't trying to get it into Hollywood.

He just felt the impulse to make this this film and arguably it's just as interesting, if not a better film than The Devil's Mistress.

And certainly he's a much more confident film maker, I feel.

And George Andrews.

(Scott) Where are you at with the archiving restoration process?

Have you completed all that now?

Are you still going through cans of films?

(Julia) Well, you know, the the work was pretty much completed last year, last summer and the summer before when I had the opportunity to just digitize all of these films.

And I have to say, these digital copies are not archival quality copies.

They're done on a machine called the Retro Scan.

And it's kind of a I think, you know, there's different qualities, I suppose, of these scanners that can digitize a film.

And so even though I kind of know everything that's in the archive and the scans are good enough for my documentary, it would be great to see those all receive the funding to get them scanned at the quality that an archival digital copy would require.

(Scott) Well, since you started the whole process, how has how have your feelings about Orval wanzer's life and his work evolved from then and now?

In some ways, he's still this kind of figure that I saw him as early on, which is an iconoclast, somebody who is not following along with the rules that most people would associate of good behavior or what's worth studying or what's worth doing in this life.

And in some ways, I think, you know, he when you find a story about a person's life, it no longer became about his film.

It was about his art and his life.

And there was this more biographical quality to it.

And so I think one of the things that I've I've done and it's helped me grow as a person too, is sort of grapple with some of the things that you find out about a person that are like, Oh, that's a little, you know, hard to to wrap my head around in the context of this story, or how does that make me think about this film differently?

For example?

And so what I think I have discovered is that it is the sort of imperfections and, you know, sort of curveballs that you find out about people that make your relationship with them stronger, even though they're more fraught maybe.

And so it's a strange thing where I feel like I know more about this person than most people.

He's not alive.

I met him, you know, briefly at the end of his life, but I feel like I have this kind of ghostly sort of relationship with him.

(Scott) well we have about a minute left.

What would you like to add about Orville wanzer that we haven't discussed, especially pertaining to his legacy?

(Julia) One of the things I like to think about with Orville wanzer was his goal with the Devil's Mistress, which was to create he created the first independent production company, and he saw that as being a possibility in New Mexico.

Because of our beautiful landscape, we can make films cheaply with locals, with the amateur cast, and these can be meaningful films.

And in some ways I see that legacy maybe coming to fruition more, despite the fact that we do have a sort of heavy industry Hollywood focus that we're not really sure at this point how much it's helping the locals.

And so I think for wanzer, it's this legacy of filmmaking in New Mexico that's independent.

It's for the people and by the people, and it's not necessarily for profit.

It's so that we can keep making art on our terms.

(Scott) Well, Julia Smith, thank you so much for visiting us and talking about the life and work of orville waner that we appreciate it.

(Julia) Thanks so much, Scott.

(Scott) In central El Paso sits Mystic Desert Art Studio, where we find a papier-mache artist from Juárez who promotes teaches and shows how trash and discarded items can be reused to create art through mixed media, all while cleaning up our environment.

{Music} When I was in high school, I had an art teacher who taught me a basic formula of papier-mache.

And from there it kind of like blew my mind for the possibilities that you could do with everything that is lying down without any use.

We create different workshops in which we teach the magic, the splendid world of papier-mache.

One of our goals is to have more papier-mache artists in the region.

I also share the joy.

These were from the last workshop that was done here in Mystic Desert, which is from our amazing brother friend, Gabrielle Marquez, amazing artist from the region as well.

And thanks to him for opening the doors, we also have the opportunity to showcase the work of the participants and also of this project that we've been working on, which is called Masuda, in which, like we were talking, we're recycling the newspaper in the cardboard and also picking up trash from different places of the region to reuse it and to decorate our identity to make it beautiful.

I find it extremely important to share any type of expression to the community because a community deserves to know about all of these different expressions, especially of the expression the uses recycle those here.

Recycle y usar (reuse) pero, All of the different expressions are important.

It's just a matter of also being conscious of what you're using and what's the impact as well.

We've been doing workshops for about four years, about four or five years, and it's been amazing.

The results are always very satisfying and surprising.

Everybody puts out a big smile and really kind of like finds themselves into the character and into the narrative that they create.

And it's just really fun and it's a very therapeutic time for oneself and it's just a very nice feeling.

And people also we invite people to collect trash and bring it over and then we use it.

And it's just this is a performance like a trash party.

Basically, the trash could be great prime material for a lot of different things.

And yes, healing the planet, healing yourself, and also helping yourself know to also enjoy all of this process.

{music} (Scott) Thanks for joining us for Fronteras A Changing America.

You can find this episode and any you may have missed on our YouTube channel, which you can access krWG dot org.

{music}